Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos Simpson, A. (new books to read .txt) 📖

when they were close enough to engage, they were also nearing the debris field of wrecked hulks. When the first shots were fired, when the screen showed Maddy the incoming pulse beams, she loosed her own barrage from all of their mounted guns. She tracked them, made impossible calculations in her head and fired a hundred miles in front of where they would be. She was uncannily accurate and splashes of deflected rounds bounced off the front of their ships. Jessie cut into the debris field and hit the gravity thrusters as he shot past slowly rotating ships who had tried and failed to get through the gate. They spun wildly away from him and he skimmed more, sending them tumbling towards the pursuers.

The pirates followed through the maze as he rolled and twisted their ceremonial cruiser around the stripped ships and Maddy blasted away every time she locked in on one of the pursuers. By timing the hyper drive thrusts from the ion engines and the antigravity projectors, he could turn on a dime, send abandoned craft careening towards their followers and generally cause mayhem and wanton destruction. He slung them into a rolling dive, slipped between a freighter and a transport and bounced thrusts off each as he spun through. He could hear things in the rear of the ship flying around and in the back of his mind, he dreaded the look on her face when she realized he hadn’t put away the dirty dishes from lunch like he was supposed to. He hoped he latched the fridge, he couldn’t remember.

Maddy swung the guns with the roll, the gyroscope ball moving independent of the ship and aimed at the tail of a stripped transporter to send it careening wildly towards one of the pirates. She kept blasting it until Jessie jerked them away in an impossible turn using full reverse thrusters and the gravity projectors to rocket them off at an oblique angle. The pirate avoided the tumbling ship but smashed through a hail of flying debris. A broken cargo door caught one of his thrusters and sheared it off. The ship jerked sideways and plowed into the freighter sending a silent scream of metal and critical parts into the vacuum of space.

Jesse dodged around a serenely floating family cruiser and pulled up hard in front of the jump gate, the rear of his ship only feet from the shimmering waves of the wormhole. They watched as the debris field of a hundred broken ships collided and sent tons of metal and alloy chunks spinning through space. What had been hard to navigate was now impossible at any speed. They saw the flames of at least two wrecked ships, their oxygen burning fast and turning the blackness into light. A dull colored ship darted over a tumbling hulk, dropped into the clearing near the gate and stopped only a few hundred miles away. Almost touching in space distance. Jessie diverted more of the power to their shields. If the ship fired, he would shove them through the gate. Another joined the first and as they watched the rest of the ships that had survived formed up on his wings. Six ships in an attack formation. All around them derelict ships were still smashing into each other, bouncing off and spinning in different directions. An ancient freighter slowly tumbled end over end spewing debris between them as they watched it and the waiting pirates.

The monitor beeped, an incoming call was being requested. Jessie answered and saw one of the reptilian men staring at him with hard, black eyes.

“I only wanted to see the face of the fool that will adorn my wall.” He said in universal, his voice hissing and drawing out the S’s.

“Come get some.” Jessie said and waggled his wings at them.

The space junk was still tumbling between them, too dangerous to fly through and too risky to fire cannons. Ricochets could send debris in any direction and a thousand-pound chunk of metal smashing into a ship at a thousand miles an hour could do real damage.

“This is the only way out.” The creature said. “We’ll be waiting for you if the Queen doesn’t have your head on a pike.”

Jessie tapped the reverse thrusters and they shimmered out of sight.

29

The Queen of the Outer Reaches

The craft shook from the volcanic eruptions as soon as they cleared the jump gate and the gravity pulled them to the planets’ surface. Jessie rolled hard out of the path of a steaming geyser and hit the thrusters, rocketed away from the molten rock, slid past the gate and gained altitude. He hovered thirty thousand feet above the lava and vapor covered planet while Maddy joined him, ran the scanners and searched for the most likely place the Queen would be. Everything below them was glowing red and orange through the mists and even at their altitude the cabin was sweltering. The life support system had gone from generating heat in the subzero temperatures of space to trying to cool them down in the thousand-degree blast furnace of the spewing volcanoes.

“This one.” She said and tapped the screen, indicating one of the moons orbiting the molten planet.

Jessie hit the thrusters, broke through the stratosphere and into the coolness of space. The air conditioners hummed to a halt and the heaters kicked in again as he flipped on the ion engines and angled towards a blue-green moon. He circled once, found the only city near an ocean then entered the atmosphere.

“We’ve been targeted.” She said “They have locked on, probably with military grade proton cannons stripped from the Naval Destroyer we passed in the debris field.”

“Man, this might not have been the best idea.” Jessie said as he guided the ship towards the landing beacons. “I thought she was just some crime boss or something, I didn’t know she could jack military ships and get away with it.”

“The data I could assimilate on her is vague, mostly third and fourth